Not the popular choice: emphatic win but approval rating could be a lot better

Tony Abbott has not only made history by leading an opposition into government for only the seventh time since the war, he's also defeated the most consistently popular prime minister of the past 40 years.

Although Kevin Rudd was no longer a popular leader by the time the 2013 election arrived, "Rudd was even more popular than Bob Hawke on average in the history of our poll series," says the Fairfax pollster, Nielsen's John Stirton.

Yet while the Abbott ascendancy is emphatic, Australia's embrace is not ecstatic. It is tentative, uncertain, qualified. Abbott's victory has broken a 40-year-old rule. "Tony Abbott is the first unpopular opposition leader to win an election" in the history of the Fairfax Nielsen poll, Stirton points out.

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"The difference between him and other opposition leaders who've won is that they all had a clear net positive approval rating." The election outcome shows a resounding rejection of Rudd's Labor government with a swing against it on primary votes of 4.1 per cent.

But it also reveals a hesitant vote of confidence in Abbott's Coalition – fewer than half of the voters who abandoned Rudd switched to the Coalition, which gained only 1.7 per cent on primary votes.

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The biggest beneficiary was Clive Palmer's party, campaigning to "Reunite Australia" even as it urges secession for northern Queensland. The Palmer United Party went from 0 to over 5 per cent of the vote in one go.

Nevertheless, Abbott's conservative Coalition government will enjoy a very sizeable majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives of over 30 seats. After the distribution of preferences, the swing to the Coalition was 3.5 per cent.

And while it will not command a majority in the Senate, neither will the Labor-Greens bloc, on the balance of probabilities from early counting.

So the Labor-Greens axis seems unlikely to be able to frustrate Abbott's agenda. But it is likely that the Abbott government will need to negotiate its bills through a Senate where the balance of power is held by an idiosyncratic assemblage of independents and fringe parties, though the results won't be known for days yet.

This means his core promises – including the repeal of the carbon tax and measures worth $20 billion in revenue to the government – will be held hostage to the whims and wiles of a gaggle of legislators ranging from the sane centrist Nick Xenophon to a pair of untested senators from the Palmer United Party.

Yet, of the realistic options available, this was about the best possible outcome for Abbott. Governments have only controlled the Senate in three of the past 30 years. It was never a realistic prospect for Abbott.

And, as Abbott himself has pointed out, untrammelled control of both houses of Parliament is not necessarily the great advantage it might appear: "Getting control of the Senate was a curse," he said in 2008 of the Howard government's achievement in 2004. "It allowed us to do things that we would not normally have been allowed to get away with, and I think it tempted us to chance our arm in ways which did us significant political damage," he told me. Exhibit A was Howard's Work Choices policy.

Abbott was talking about Labor when he said in his victory speech on Saturday: "It is the people of Australia who determine the government and the prime ministership of this country and you will punish anyone who takes you for granted." Labor's 34 per cent of the primary vote was its lowest in a century and confirms the exhaustion of the Labor franchise that saw its primary vote in the mid-20s in state elections in NSW and Queensland.

It is a party that needs to reach deeper than discussions of its leadership into the existential questions of its purpose and its mission if it hopes to recover.

Yet Abbott might have made the same remark about Howard's determination to impose Work Choices. He learnt from the Howard years the paramount importance of a prime minister limiting his actions to the constraints of his mandate.

A Senate that demands item-by-item negotiation of the government's program could be, despite its frustrations, a useful check. Bad ideas and poor policy can be allowed to die in the Senate.

Australia's low expectations of Abbott can also be an advantage. It allows him to grow into the job, to exceed expectations, to earn the people's respect.

"Tony needs to confound the people's expectations, not confirm them," said one of his frontbenchers. "It's an opportunity for him."

Can he do it? We already know he can. His conduct as a minister in the Howard government provided a glimpse of the grown-up prime minister Abbott needs to become.